2015 has already been dubbed the ‘Year of the Candidate’ and in turn the role of the recruiter has changed too. Faster timescales have been enabled by social media and mobile. Add in the new complexities of employers looking to support flexible working and access new added-value skill sets, and the recruitment model looks very different.
Social media now dominates the way candidates look to engage with new employers; mobile is the standard way of interacting online; and a raft of employment legislation in tandem with cultural shifts has fundamentally changed the way people work. From flexible working to zero hour contracts, international placements to demands for employees that offer more than just the standard skill set, this is truly a 21st century employment market. So just how is this new era of recruitment affecting what recruitment consultants are expected to deliver?
While step one has to be a highly efficient and effective mobile enabled recruitment process to support the mobile enabled consultant – it is also about search.
Consistent Search
There is no doubt that companies’ hiring requirements are becoming more complex as they look to fill roles in different ways to support flexible working, the need for interim managers to support a new business initiative, even looking for different skill sets. Add in the explosion in internal and external data sources and it is now essential to put in place the right combination of approach, technique and supporting technology when it comes to search.
The good news is that a number of new search tools have been developed in response to the changing data environment, from indexing to data ontology. However, as most recruitment companies can attest, there is a huge divergence in the quality of search achieved by different consultants due to expertise, confidence and approach.
One important area of development is contextual search. Working across both unstructured and structured data, contextual search bases the results on an understanding of what is contained in the text rather than a filename or associated field, making it a far more intelligent form of searching. The benefits include not only faster search but, critically, improved accuracy of match results. By unearthing more links between a candidate and a job specification, consultants have a greater chance of identifying more relevant candidates – and delivering those candidates to the client sooner. Critically, in this candidates’ market, great search enables the consultant to identify more opportunities for top candidates – reducing the risk of those candidates looking at competitors?.
Stand out
There are so many ways that a recruitment company can begin to differentiate itself from the competition – such as offering video interviews for those candidates looking for a significant geographic relocation for example, or using psychometric testing to identify the best fit based on personality, logic, and many other traits that employers are increasingly seeking.
But all of this activity will be in vain if the fundamental processes have not been enhanced to support the new candidate-centric, 24 hour recruitment model. Recruiters need mobile-enabled processes that deliver the speed of response and intuitive search.
Having successfully adapted to the way candidates behave and created a business model that can deliver that fast candidate turnaround, consultancies can not only keep one step ahead of the competition but increase their candidate appeal and stand out from the crowd.
